Perils of the Sunday Return to the City

Flickr/wonderlane

One nice thing about taking up residence — even weekend residence — on the east side of the Hudson is that the route back to the city is the almost always traffic-less Taconic Parkway. 87 is often a parking lot all the way back to exit 19, and if you don’t get motion sickness or have any problems with night blindness, the smooth-sailing Taconic will seem like a breeze.

Except when there’s a rainstorm. Or, rather, except when there’s a blinding torrent erasing any semblance of white lines on the side of the road, as there was last night. We’ve never seen anything like it: the road disappeared completely, and but for the kind folks driving the cars ahead of us putting on their blinkers, as almost everyone did, the cars would have disappeared, too. There’s very little shoulder on the Taconic, with long spaces between exits and no rest areas; it can be hard to discern the street signs when you finally cross a local road.

After the sixth bout of biblical rain, we started looking for a hotel in which to hunker down for the night, but the nearest one was 10 miles from the spot where the water was stranding us. So we white knuckled it, mustered up some prayers and drove through, making it home safely and — the real miracle — finding a parking spot in front of our Park Slope building.